Mercury Falling

by Robert Edric

  ‘I never heard them go,’ he said.

  ‘So? They’ve only gone down the road a few miles. Something about a lock-keeper wanting a couple of vans for his livestock. Chickens. They’ll be hours yet. They do a fair bit of business with him. I wouldn’t be surprised if the man didn’t have a still somewhere.’

  He’d heard the brothers talk about the man and the spirit he distilled.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said.

  ‘If you say so. Where’d you get the carpet?’

  ‘One of the other empty vans.’ He’d gathered up crockery and glassware, whatever packets and tins of food had been left behind. He’d taken two additional heaters and whatever fuel he could find. He’d be long gone before anyone turned up to complain about the thefts.

  At the far end of the caravan the bed was extended and propped on its legs. There was little point in folding it away each day.

  ‘I could get you a better mattress,’ Maria said. She left the table and went to sit on the edge of the bed. Devlin followed her.

  ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about you for days afterwards,’ he told her, bracing himself against her response.

  ‘Only days?’ she said. ‘I must be losing my touch.’

  ‘Longer, then.’

  She took hold of his hand and pressed it to her breast. He could feel the shape and weight of it beneath her clothing.

  ‘Bring back any memories?’ she said, catching her breath.

  He moved closer to her and kissed her awkwardly, first on the side of her mouth and then on her lips, careful not to draw away from her and give her the chance to do the same and tell him she’d made a mistake. They both still held their cups and so sat awkwardly on the low bed. Eventually, Devlin drew back from her, took the cup from her and put them both on the floor.

  ‘I was drinking that,’ she said. Her eyes searched back and forth across his face and then she kissed him again.

  A moment later she pulled away from him and unfastened the buttons at her throat.

  Devlin watched her, convinced and uncertain in equal measure about what to do next.

  ‘You know this is all it is?’ she said to him, her eyes fixed now.

  Devlin nodded.

  ‘What I’m saying is – you don’t need to go getting any more of those big ideas of yours.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Devlin said, still uncertain what she was telling him.

  ‘I make you no promises and you make none of your own.’

  ‘Deal,’ Devlin said, and then watched her as she unfastened the rest of her buttons and pulled her blouse apart to reveal the darker flesh beneath.

  23

  THE THREE OF them sat in the lorry at the end of the track leading to Dovecote Farm. It was two in the morning, and for the past two hours there had been no other traffic on the narrow road.

  Devlin had worked it out: it had been almost six weeks since he’d been there with Duggan. He pointed out the distant outlines to the McGuires.

  Without switching on the headlights, Patrick drove off the road and along the track until they came within fifty yards of the farm’s outermost buildings. Devlin showed them the barn where he and Duggan had been.

  ‘You wait here,’ Colm told him, and he and Patrick climbed down from the lorry and stood waiting in the darkness.

  ‘I should come with you,’ Devlin said. ‘It’s my—’

  ‘Your what, exactly?’ Patrick said in a loud whisper. ‘We could just as easily have done this without a word to you. You sure what Duggan told you?’

  That he’d stay well clear of the place and everything it contained for as long as possible.

  ‘You keep an eye on the road and flash the lights if anyone comes,’ Colm said to Devlin. It was how the brothers worked: a veiled threat from Patrick followed by reassurance from Colm, until whoever was on the receiving end of their double act had little idea of where he truly stood.

  Before he could answer them, the two men walked away from the lorry into the darkness, casting occasional fleeting shadows where the near-full moon caught them against the buildings.

  Patrick went to the empty farmhouse and pushed open the door. Colm joined him and they went inside, emerging five minutes later with a sack, which they dropped noisily in the yard. Only then did they go to where Devlin had directed them.

  Devlin heard a loud banging and then the crack of breaking timber. They had prised the padlock off the barn door. He scanned the track and the road far behind him. Nothing showed through the darkness. An early frost had been forecast beneath the clear night sky and Devlin saw the first bloom of this across the empty ground.

  Colm came back to him.

  ‘You were right. Patrick wants you to come and see if Duggan’s been back already.’

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘It matters. It means he might be coming back regularly instead of waiting to pick the stuff up later in one visit. He’s not stupid. He knows you’re still out there somewhere, nursing a grudge. It stands to reason that he’d come himself and not let on to anyone else what he’s got stashed here. It’s a proper little treasure trove. Unlikely he’ll be able to unload everything at once.’

  ‘I know all that,’ Devlin said.

  What he also knew, what he’d known the instant he’d opened his drunken mouth and told them the name of the place, was that Duggan would know immediately who had talked. When he’d suggested this to Patrick, Patrick had laughed and then told him that anyone could have stumbled across the place and all it held. Finders keepers and all that. The brave part of Devlin wanted to believe that Duggan was getting everything he deserved, and that he, Devlin, was still owed his fair share of everything they’d brought there. The other, larger part of him understood that he had now set in motion a train of likely events that could not end well for any of them, especially himself. It was still a small world, and it was still mostly Duggan’s world.

  ‘We’re waiting,’ Colm said angrily.

  ‘He won’t have been,’ Devlin said.

  ‘You’re guessing. We need to know, to be sure.’

  Colm walked back into the darkness and Devlin followed him.

  In the barn he went from pile to pile, pulling away the dried straw. He remembered stacking most of what the three of them uncovered.

  ‘It’s all here,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Probably means Duggan’s still working solo,’ Patrick said. ‘Which gives us a bit of an advantage. Show us what’s what and we’ll get the best of it out first.’

  ‘What you reckon?’ Colm said. ‘Two or three trips?’

  ‘Hardly matters. All that matters now is that we’re long gone by the time Duggan gets wind. We’ll play the same game: stash everything somewhere else and then sit on our hands for a few months. Leave a trail involving others and he’ll be on to us like that.’ He clicked his fingers.

  He’ll be on to us anyway, Devlin thought, but said nothing.

  ‘Stands to reason, he’ll come looking,’ Patrick said. ‘And he’ll know where you are by now,’ he said to Devlin. He shared one of his glances with Colm.

  Meaning what?

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ Colm said. ‘You’re with us now. Duggan can go on putting two and two together for as long as he likes. Like Patrick says, all we have to do is keep everything hidden and then keep playing the innocent.’

  ‘He’s hardly likely to go running to the police, is he?’ Patrick said, causing his brother to laugh.

  ‘You’re not laughing,’ Colm said to Devlin.

  ‘I wonder why.’

  Patrick pushed him hard in the chest. ‘What, you think we’re out to cheat you like Duggan did? There’s enough here for all of us. You watch our back, we watch yours. Besides, what does Duggan really stand to lose? Easy come, easy go, that’s the trick. Not as though it cost him in the first place, is it? And I’m betting you did most of the grafting, am I right?’

  Devlin nodded, unconvinced.

  ‘So, by rights, half of it’s your
s anyway. Like Colm says, stop worrying – any grief Duggan feels the need to hand out will come to us. We’re the ones stealing his half of things. All you’re doing is taking back what’s already yours.’

  It was one way of looking at it.

  ‘You arrive at a point in life,’ Colm said, pushing Patrick away from Devlin, ‘when you decide to stop being walked all over. Especially by men like Ray Duggan, who think they’ve got a God-given right to do it. You’ve got to stand up for yourself eventually and push back every now and again. Besides’ – another glance, the start of a smile on his lips – ‘you and Maria. Just imagine how she’s going to look at all this when we tell her what you’ve done for us. Three-way split, this lot. Equal measures. Wait until she works out how much of that will eventually come her way. She was always the one for numbers. You think Duggan was ever going to cut you in for even a tiny part of that? You think money doesn’t matter to Maria? You think she doesn’t deserve a few of the – what they called? – the finer things in life?’

  They were manipulating him, playing on all these new and uncertain connections, and he saw that.

  ‘If it was me,’ Patrick said, ‘I’d wait until we’d got our hands on the lot and then I’d paint a message on the wall telling Duggan exactly who it was who’d got the better of him.’

  Devlin waited to make sure he wasn’t being serious.

  ‘He’s joking,’ Colm said. ‘You know us – since when did we ever bring that kind of trouble to our door? Never have, never will. Think about it. It’s why you’re safe with us. Chances are, Duggan doesn’t credit you with being smart or brave enough to come up with something like this.’

  ‘And if he does?’ Devlin said.

  ‘Then we’ll tell him it was all on us. It’s probably what he’d rather think, anyway.’

  ‘We’re wasting time,’ Patrick said. ‘We’re here now and the lock’s smashed. What are we going to do – pretend we never saw it and leave it all for somebody else?’

  It was the kind of thin, fractured reasoning that worked well for the brothers. It was starting to work for Devlin.

  ‘Go and get the lorry,’ Colm told him, and he and Patrick started sorting out what they would take that night.

  Devlin went back to the lorry and manoeuvred it closer to the barn, reversing it through the open doorway. He studied the empty farmhouse, wondering how long it had been abandoned – since long before the flood, judging by the state of it – and he wondered too about the farmer and his family who had once lived there. Perhaps it would one day be a thriving farm again, the land properly drained and improved. Perhaps another man and his wife and family would make a good and dependable future for themselves there. It was exactly the kind of opportunity Devlin himself would once have appreciated.

  He was distracted from these thoughts by the noise of crates being thrown and stacked on the lorry’s bed. The boxes sounded like falling masonry in the darkness. He shouted for Patrick and Colm not to make so much noise, but they only laughed at his concern.

  ‘Who do you think is going to hear us?’ Patrick said. ‘And what if someone does hear? You think they’re going to come running at this time of night? Duggan’s twenty miles away, so he’s not going to hear a thing. There’s always somebody ready to whisper in his ear, I’ll give you that, but he’s not as popular as he likes to think he is. He’s crossed a lot of people in his time; not everybody is happy to forever go on begging for scraps from his table.’

  ‘Meaning …’ Devlin began to say.

  ‘Meaning that perhaps the reign of Mister High and Mighty Duggan is finally coming to an end.’ Patrick seemed to surprise even himself with the remark and all it implied. ‘We’re still wasting time,’ he said, and turned his attention back to the cases.

  Less than an hour later they were on the road approaching the wintering ground, the lorry loaded and everything hidden from view beneath a tarpaulin. The plan was for Devlin and Colm to be dropped off at the compound and for Patrick to then leave the lorry and its load somewhere safe a mile away. They would unload and hide the cases the following day.

  ‘Lucky we found you,’ Colm said to Devlin as they approached the vans and trailers.

  Found him?

  ‘You’re like a lucky charm,’ Patrick added. They sat on either side of Devlin, looking neither at him nor at one another.

  It was almost four in the morning before Devlin climbed into the warm bed beside Maria.

  Part II

  Winter

  24

  THE FIRST SNOW came early and settled on the cold fields. Eight days of a cloud-filled sky with no sun. On the few days the ground warmed above freezing, the snow melted and then refroze to ice, building in layers. The water in troughs and water butts froze and stayed frozen. When the wind rose from the sea it blew fresh loose snow horizontally across the open land. And each day spanning the end of November into December fresh falls came, mostly during the afternoons as darkness fell, and then lasting into the night.

  People spoke of another hard winter. Only five or six years since the last one. Longer, perhaps, but it seemed more recent, especially with memories of the flood so fresh in people’s minds. Dykes froze, and then the slow and stagnant lengths of some of the drains. Culverts were cleared and locks secured, but to little effect. The wind came from the east, from Russia, from Siberia. And when it turned occasionally, from the north, from the Arctic. People spoke as though there were a strategy to the coming winter, battles and war, and as though they were the unforgiven, unmissable target.

  At the wintering ground everything was sheeted and roped, stalls finally dismantled and laid flat. Grease was put in handfuls on the generators and over axles and all other working parts. Strips of lights were dismantled and repairs made. Some of the flimsier caravans and trailers were secured to the ground with ropes and stakes.

  Devlin helped the McGuire brothers and others in all this. The weather closing in like that made him feel secure. There was fuel for the heaters, and water could always be stored inside, although even there it frequently froze overnight. He got used to his lungs aching in the cold air and feeling his warm breath cauled over his face whenever he was outside for any length of time.

  The sheets, blankets and eiderdowns on the bed he shared with Maria were mounded two feet deep. There was always some warmth to be found or created. Some said the early bad weather would be gone by the middle of the month. Some said it would last well into the New Year. Some said March, like the last lot.

  After a fortnight, Devlin stopped thinking and worrying about Duggan. And if the brothers had given the man a second thought, then nothing was revealed to him. Devlin knew that he remained a threat to the others while he was at the compound; he also knew that his relationship with Maria coloured everything he now did and said in their company.

  The three of them had cleared the barn over four successive nights and had then unloaded everything at a disused boatyard on the Welland, where a boat builder hid the stuff for a price. He was a close friend of the McGuires and grimaced every time Duggan’s name was mentioned. There was neither sight nor sound of Duggan himself while all this happened. And then the bad weather had come.

  The boatyard was filled with timber and half a dozen dismantled barges. A forge stood at its centre, where the boat builder hammered out bands and pins of metal for what little work still remained to him. Mounds of resin-scented sawdust and puddles of solid pitch lay scattered across every part of the bare earth of the place. Devlin had asked the man if there was enough work for an extra pair of hands and the boat builder had said there was hardly enough for one man, and that most of what he now did would show no profit whatsoever.

  Outside, in the first of the sharp air, on a rare day when the cloud over the sea thinned and blue showed through, Devlin sat on a baulk of timber overlooking the dark course of the channel. He searched its straightened length, watching flotsam snag and then float free along its banks. Boats sat moored for a hundred yards in each directio
n, pale smoke rising from some of their stacks. Other yards, mostly disused or empty of work, stretched along the waterway towards the open sea.

  Patrick and Colm had come to him where he sat. The plan now, they told him, was to leave what they had stolen for the whole winter and to wait until the drainage work started up again before selling everything on. They said it as though the winter would wipe everything clean, make people forget, create new chances and opportunities. And Devlin had gone along with all this. Mostly because there was nothing else he could do under the circumstances, but partly, and with a growing conviction, because it was what he too was starting to believe. He had asked them if he could have some money on account. ‘On account of what?’ Patrick had said. To see him through. ‘To see you through what?’ Why was he suddenly becoming so demanding? What, really, was there for him to worry about apart from keeping warm? It was all a joke to the brothers. Stop worrying, they told him; something would turn up – it always did. Whatever happened, they wouldn’t let him starve, and even if they did go hungry on occasion there would always be a bottle of something on the table to help him forget his hunger. Seriously, what more could he ask for? And anything he did want, he only had to ask. Where the brothers and their demands and concessions were concerned, Devlin sometimes felt as though he were in one of those kids’ mazes where the walls rose only a foot off the ground.

  Patrick said once that it seemed to him that the McGuires had already done more for Devlin than everyone else in his life put together. It was another of the man’s vague but clever arguments that Devlin could not counter. Why behave so ungratefully when all he owed them was his gratitude?

  He’d sat on the bank of the Welland and watched a barge move towards the sea. The whole vessel was black from prow to stern and rose barely a yard out of the water. Sooty smoke trailed behind it like a scarf in the cold air, hanging for a moment and then slowly falling to settle on the river. A solitary man stood at the helm and he, too, was black from head to foot.

  ‘Coal,’ Patrick had said, guessing at the cargo’s start and finish. He warned Devlin to stay clear of this work, however desperate he became. Their uncle had worked on the coalers for twenty years and had died before he was forty, having coughed up his blackened lungs. Even the man’s flesh had turned black. Even his blood. Both Patrick and Colm had risen to their feet to spit into the barge’s churning wake. The vessel cleared the low pipe bridge and then continued towards the open sea and blue sky. The man at the tiller raised his hand to them as he passed. Buckets of coal lined the deck and stood at the doorway to the small cabin. It looked a cushy number to Devlin and he said so, and so Patrick told him about their eleven fatherless cousins and their wrung-out mother, old before her time, living in a council house – a fucking council house – in Peterborough. Peterborough. He made it sound as though the woman were living in her own coffin.